Born to sing: Fiji's "singing culture" and implications for music education in Canada

McGill Journal of Education, Fall 2001 by Joan Russell

In my university classrooms too many students for my liking claim to be unmusical (Russell, 1996a). These students express trepidation at the prospect of having to sing, yet they enjoy singing. Unfortunately, their lack of confidence in their singing ability inhibits them and slows the pace of their musical progress.

My Fijian acquaintance's confident assertion, "We were born to sing" fueled my conviction that singing ability is more than a biological gift: it is a human behaviour that develops under favourable socio-cultural conditions. The comment suggests that there is a relationship between the desire, the will, and the ability to sing and the values, beliefs and practices of an identifiable group - whether it is as small as a family or as large as a classroom, school or community (Erickson, 1986). It suggests that in a singing culture group members believe that they are singers, and have the conviction that singing has value. It supports the notion that singing is a socio-culturally embedded phenomenon. Surely, students are more likely to develop singing abilities, confidence in their abilities, and to learn song repertoire, if they are part of a culture where group singing is widely practiced and is perceived to have social and personal value.

A newspaper article a few years ago reported on a social event attended by university students from different countries. The students had participated together in an international project and this was their last evening together. One of the organizers invited the students from each country to sing a song from their country. The Canadian students could not think of a Canadian song to sing. As a music educator with a love of Canadian music, I found this distressing. The incident contributed to my belief that music educators in Canada must look to thriving musical cultures to learn how these cultures support the development of song repertoire and singing skills.

What could be learned from the singing practices of a rural, agrarian, geographically isolated society that could possibly be relevant to music education in an urban, industrialized society with global interests? Mead (1928, 1955, 1961) addressed a similar question: What could be learned from studying the behaviours of adolescent Samoan girls that could be relevant to understanding the behaviours of adolescent girls in the United States? Her study led her to conclude that adolescent behaviour is not biologically pre-determined, but is a result of socio-cultural processes. At the time of Mead's study this was a conclusion with important implications for the way we understood behaviour. If I could learn about the sociocultural conditions in which a singing culture flourishes, perhaps it would help my own work as a music teacher educator. If I could generate a cultural grammar as Heath defines it, perhaps it could be a source of inspiration for music educators.

This is the reason for my choice of focus in this paper. It describes the singing practices of selected Fijian communities and identifies some of the social conditions that support widespread and skillful singing in order to propose a cultural grammar - a set of guidelines or rules that define what individuals within a society, community, or group have to know, produce, predict, interpret, evaluate within a given setting or social group in order to participate appropriately (Heath, 1982; Heath, 1983). With full recognition of the cultural differences involved, the extracted grammar can nevertheless be used as a guide to generate ideas for the development of a singing culture in a western school.